of it. A moment ago you were calling her a child.”
“If she was acting like a woman, I can call her a bitch,” she said. “But bitchy, sexy, needy, none of it gives any man license to swing his dick around.”
“You can’t beat me up about what I did any more than I’ve already beaten myself up. Just get rid of that damn thing.”
“Is it what’s holding you here?”
“And make sure Teal gets proof of delivery,” he said, and dematerialized.
She picked up Susie and rocked her, wondering if all love was doomed from the start and the lovers too besotted to notice the warnings.
She dropped the ring on Teal’s desk. “I believe this is what your heir hoped I’d find.”
Teal picked it up and examined the engraving. “Just so. She also mentioned some letters.”
“You said at closing you didn’t have a list.”
He responded with a tight smile. Through the open windows, the sea wind carried harbor smells of fuel and seaweed, along with curry and fry smoke from the roti trucks serving up lunch beside the destroyed seawall.
“Jack burned many letters,” she said. “Nothing left but charred fragments.” She pulled from her tote a package wrapped in her hand-painted paper. “Put this in along with the ring,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll find the subject of interest. Kindly send me confirmation that your package has been received. I’ll be relieved to be shut of this burdensome obligation.”
She stood up, and before Teal could rise from his chair she was out the door and gulping sea air.
Darkness had fallen an hour ago, but she hadn’t moved from the big chair. Barking furiously, Susie leapt off her stomach and knocked Els’s near-empty rum glass to the floor.
Els sat up and turned on the Chinese lamp. She grabbed the bandana that served as Susie’s collar, pulled the puppy against her knees, and shouted, “Enough,” and Susie subsided into yelps, then growls, then tense silence. There was no sound but the faint hum of the fridge, the palm fronds rattling, and the faraway barking of dogs.
Els felt alone, not just in the house but in the world. She gathered Susie into her arms, a talisman against whatever or whomever might be skulking about in the dark outside.
Jack stepped forward, gradually taking form in the lamplight. “I still can’t get the hang of being a good guest.”
“Thank God it’s only you,” she said.
“That feels like a promotion. How quickly the terrifying becomes the merely annoying.” He was fit and spry, in his thirties again. He stopped to admire the photo of Susie-as-sand-dune—her ribs, the intimation of arch to her back, a suggestion of passion. “This one’s my favorite,” he said.
“Now that I’ve done your dirty work,” she said, “does yir karma feel any better?”
“‘Like a kite cut from the string, lightly the soul of my youth has taken flight,’” he said. “Japanese poet, name of Takuboku. They named a comet or something after him. What are you going to do with the letters?”
“What would you suggest? Publish them?”
He looked at her, a flash of malice in his eyes, then turned pensive again. “Best to pretend they didn’t survive.”
“Precisely.” She shot him a conspiratorial smile. “I never said whose letters you torched in the tub.”
“If you’d returned them, she’d know you read them. Only a saint could resist that.”
“No halo here,” she said. “I sent her a little gift through Teal. Three-by-fives of those nudes.”
He laughed, Pirate Jack for a second. “That’s my girl.” He looked at her a long time, smiling, then said, “See ya,” and floated down the kitchen steps.
“Is that it?” she called. “Are we all done? Are ye gone?”
She hadn’t contemplated the consequences of complying with his request. At the idea that he might have left so abruptly and for good, she felt anew the prick of abandonment. Though she knew it was pointless, she checked the kitchen and went out to the empty court. A pearly-eyed thrasher sang from the mango tree, two notes up, two notes down, another two notes down.
CHAPTER 30
On the first of May, Lauretta stopped in to bring her previous month’s invoice. She refused a beer and stood in the kitchen with her arms crossed, twitching with nervous energy.
Els dropped the invoice on the table. “I’ll give you part of it now and the rest as soon as I can.”
“How long does that mean?”
“I’m talking to some bankers.”
“Those workmen are really bugging me.”
“Give me a week.”
“Like I have a choice,” Lauretta said, and went outside. The screen